ETHICAL CLIMATE AND RULE BENDING: HOW ORGANIZATIONAL NORMS CONTRIBUTE TO UNINTENDED RULE CONSEQUENCES
| Author | ERIN L. BORRY |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12304 |
| Published date | 01 March 2017 |
| Date | 01 March 2017 |
doi : 10. 1111/p adm .12304
ETHICAL CLIMATE AND RULE BENDING:
HOW ORGANIZATIONAL NORMS CONTRIBUTE
TO UNINTENDED RULE CONSEQUENCES
ERIN L. BORRY
Rules help ensure consistent employee behaviour, yet rule bending occurs in public organizations
every day. Previous research indicates that rule bending is inuenced by organizational structure
and personal characteristics (DeHart-Davis 2007). This present study considers the inuence of
organizational norms on rule bending by exploring the impact of ethical climate, which signals to
employees the best course of action when faced with situations that are ethical in nature (Victor and
Cullen 1987, 1988). Toinvestigate this relationship, survey data from employees of a large American
local government are analysed. Results from a structural equation model show that three ethical
climates – ‘organization interest’, ‘team interest’, and ‘rules/SOP’ – signicantly inuence rule
bending. Findings suggest that organizational norms play a critical role for employee behaviour
and public managers can consider rule bending and ethical climate as impetuses for organizational
change.
INTRODUCTION
Rules permeate all organizations: ‘Even at the most basic level, employees enter and leave
their workplaces following the rules specied in the time schedule’ (Zhou 1993, p. 1134).
Brewer and Walker (2010, p. 418) dened rules as ‘norms, regulations, procedures and
expectations that regulate individual behaviour in organizations’ which help ‘to ensure
accountability,equity, and ethical behaviour’. They are a mechanism for exerting authority
(Weber 1947 in Pugh 1966), standardizing (Pugh 1966), and coordinating, controlling,
and providing consistent decision-making (Jackson and Adams 1979). They govern
organizational ofces and conduct by setting ‘expectations for interactions’ (Walsh and
Dewar 1987, p. 218) and are tools for limiting uncertainty and increasing organizational
legitimacy (Cyert and March 1963 in Zhou 1993) and effectiveness (Weber 1946). Assum-
ing that rules exist to limit behavioural variations in pursuit of organizational goals, an
organization would strive to keep rule bending to a minimum. This is especially the
case for public organizations, where rules are often in place to ensure accountability.
However, rules themselves ‘are not automatically permitted or contested’ and ‘their
meaning and enforcement are constantly shifting, depending on the constellation of
interests both within and outside the organization’ (Martin et al. 2013, p. 567). Accord-
ingly, understanding organization members’ attitudes towards or perceptions of rules is
imperative.
Rule attitudes and perceptions can lead to variations in employee behaviour as they
interact with them:
…a most important assumption is that a rule (regulation, procedure) is a social concept and has no exis-
tence without social meaning. This is because rules are all about behavioral requirements. Since a behavioral
requirement of a rule is a dening characteristic, and since behavioral requirements are inherently social, it
follows that rules themselves are best viewed as social artifacts. (Bozeman and Feeney 2011, p. 35, emphasis
in original)
Erin L. Borry is at the Department of Government, University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA.
Public Administration Vol.95, No. 1, 2017 (78–96)
© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
ETHICAL CLIMATE AND RULE BENDING 79
These ‘behavioural requirements’ suggest that rules beget action, typically in the form
of implementation or enforcement, and such action may lead to consequences. Pugh (1966,
p. 239) argued that scholars must pay attention to the ‘attitudes, values, and goals of spe-
cialist subunits and individuals and the way in which these continuously modify the orga-
nization’s formal structure’. Given that individuals develop attitudes about rules, rules
require action, and together these may contribute to informal ways of dealing with rules,
one might wonder: are these rules actually resulting in desired behaviours?
One possible undesired behaviour – or unintended consequence – isrule bending. Rule
bending occurs when an employee chooses to depart from the requirements of a rule
or only partially follow a rule (DeHart-Davis 2007; Sekera and Zolin 2007). Individuals
who do not abide by rules are ‘bucking the system’: when rule benders exist, the formal
structure is not maintaining its goal of predictability. DeHart-Davis (2007) concluded that
organizational structure, along with one’s traits of nonconformity and risk-taking, inu-
ence rule bending, suggesting that individual and environmental factors matter.
What the current literature fails to investigate, however, is the inuence of those infor-
mal environmental factors, or organizational norms, on rule bending. ‘Early work in orga-
nization theory recognized that as social entities, organizations exert collective forces on
their members greater than the simple sum of individual attributes and beliefs (Blau and
Scott 1962). These collective forces take the shape of group – or organizational – values and
norms’ (Schminke 2001, p. 386). The structural aspects of an organization that give signals
about organizational rules are logical contributors to rule bending, but so, too, may other
factors of the organization. The missing pieces of the puzzle, to which Schminke was refer-
ring, consist of values and norms – the ‘turbulent sea of informal relations’ (Martin et al.
2013, p. 551) – that make up the context within which rule bending occurs. Even though
organizational norms are informal and not part of an organization’s formal structure, their
inuence is important, nonetheless.
One organizational norm worthy of enquiry is ethical climate. Ethical climate gives us
information about the ‘ethics’ or ‘ethical norms’ of an organization and is one of many
dimensions that make up a work climate, which partly captures the impact of the socializa-
tion processes that occur after an individual becomes a member of an organization (Victor
and Cullen 1987, p. 51). Bending rules can be considered an action with ethical dimen-
sions because it may violate the principle of abidance to organizational standards. It also
may be construed as among many types of deviant acts, which are found to be inuenced
by ethical climate in the private sector context (Peterson 2002). In addition, even though
ethics vary from one person to another, they can be inuenced by one’s environment.This
is especially true for public sector organizations, where values including accountability
and social equity (see e.g. Jorgensen and Bozeman 2007) are of utmost importance.
Two recent studies on rule bending suggest that professional norms and context
may inuence judgement and discretion that may lead to rule bending. In emergency
medicine, employees are likely to consider the circumstances as they make their choices
about rules (Henderson 2013) and police ofcers in Germany who are encouraged to voice
their thoughts and opinions may bend rules with the benet of improving organizational
processes (Brockmann 2015). In both of these cases, the informal aspects of one’s work
context inuences one’s rule bending behaviour, and this study proposes that ethical
climate may be one element of that. Thus, this research seeks to develop insight into the
following question: do particular ethical climates encourage or discourage rule bending
in public sector organizations?
Public Administration Vol.95, No. 1, 2017 (78–96)
© 2017 John Wiley& Sons Ltd.
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